shahine.com/omar/

Aditya just wrote something that struck me on his blog post about Rent.

"The trailer for Rent (via Trina) is online. Segements [sic] of Rent were shot on 6th Street, between Mission and Market, which is exactly where I live. For a week or two, movie busses, lights, and extras flooded the streets every night to shoot a couple of scenes. It you look in the trailer, all the New Year's celebration scenes are from my neighbourhood. It's pretty nutty. Club 6 became the Cat Scratch Club (?), 7th Street Haircutters became a mid 80s haircut place, some pawn shop becaome [sic] Crazy Eddie's. It's funny to think that to find grimy mid-80s NYC, the best location they found was the 6th area."

Actually, it's not very funny that they found San Francisco to be a perfect city to represent the grimy mid-80s NYC. The area of the shot, is actually grimy and much like many parts of NYC in the 80s. San Francisco is a great city, and I love it to death, but I grew up in NYC in the 80s, and saw an INCREDIBLE transformation of that city in the 90s. Most of this transformation can be attributed to the Broken Windows theory outlined by sociologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling.

"Their approach worked in New York City’s subways, where felonies have fallen by 75% in the 1990s, and all across New York City as former Police Chief William Bratton implemented many of Kelling’s and Coles’ policy recommendations."

The premise of the theory is that if some one breaks a window, and no one bothers to clean up the glass or prevent the crime from occuring in the first place, criminals, or those that may be inclided to commit crime will be more willing to do so since they think no one cares. This results in a problem that is often hard to fix with a band-aid. A good example of this is my street in SF where once a week at least one car is broken into. There is broken glass all over the place, and it remains that way till the owner shows up. Next week another car is victimized. In NYC in the 80s, my father's car was broken into the only 3 times he ever parked it on the street at night. And mind you, this is on the Upper East Side, one of the nicer parts of the city. When I was a boy walking home from school one day, two guys stole a car radio in broad daylight on 73rd and 5 avenue, and 10 feet in front of me as I walked by. Since the mid 90s I haven't heard of a en a single car broken into on my family's block. As a kid I was mugged twice in NYC. Once in Central Park and once 3 blocks from our apartment. This was the reality of NYC in the 80s.

Some other people think that the same approach that worked for NYC would not work for San Francisco. I have four things for you. 1) 6th street, 2) tenderloin, 3) the mission (mostly mission between 16th and 21st), 4) market street between the Castro and 6th street.

As a child of the 80s and 90s, and seeing how far NYC is come in terms of being a tourist friendly and generally clean city, I am often shocked when going around San Francisco by foot or by car. There are many times I've felt ashamed or embarrassed by the condition of the street, or the people in the street.

This is one of the areas that SF really falls short of NYC. There is just too much graffiti on buildings, broken car glass, trash, and displaced folks roaming around.

Generally speaking, SFO is a fantastic airport. It's 15 minutes from the city, is no where near as crowded as LAX, and has a good selection of flights from the big airlines, and many of the smaller ones. American (my preferred airline of choice has many flights there). There are two problems with SFO though.

1. The Skybridge does not exist for Terminal 1. However, it does exist for Terminal 2 and 3.
2. The AirTrain thingy does not go to long term parking.

Lets look at #1. The Skybridges are these things that connect the AirTrain to the terminals. There are 4 terminals at SFO. The old terminals, 1, 2 & 3 and the new international terminals. So to make it easy to get from the AirTrain to terminals 1, 2 & 3, SFO set out to build these bridges that bypass the necessity to go to the short term parking lot, take an elevator 5 floors down, cross some underground tunnel to the basement of the terminal and take escalators or stairs to check. The AirTrain goes right into the International terminals so they do not necessitate any AirTrain.

Now, Terminal 3 serves United and American Airlines. Terminal 2 is the old International terminal and is currently a ghost town. Terminal one is for everything else. Now get this. SFO build a Skybridge for Terminal 1 & 2, and they ran out of money to build one for 1. I would love to meet the person who decided to build a Skybridge for a Terminal that services NO passengers.

I would also like to meet the person who built out enough rail for the AirTrain to get to the beginning of the Long Term Parking lot, but not close enough to place a station there.

I bet this is just purely a result of the inefficiencies of Bureaucracy.

If you are a user of Cingular (or AT&T Wireless). MSN Mobile Messaging, which I wrote about in the past, is a really cool feature where you can have a two way conversation between yourself and a mobile phone user.

As we speak, I am sending an IM to my wife who is in a hospital where she is not signed into messenger. Rather than use my phone to SMS her I can just do so from the comfort of my computer, and when she replies it just pops back into the conversation window. If I'm not signed into messenger when she replies, it gets routed to Hotmail, and then the next time messenger signs in, all the "offline" messages that are queued for me get delivered to messenger again.

There is nothing like a persistent annoying issue to get Visual Studio fired up to put an end to a problem. Some really annoying person/bot has been leaving me 4-6 Trackback spams per day. This only happens on a handful of posts, and to make matters worse, they point back to a site that has no info.

Well NO MORE! dasBlog can now fight back against Trackback spam. After some time this weekend my Event log now says:

Info TrackbackBlocked:
Trackback Referral blocked for Tablet PCs improve employee productivity at Microsoft from http://bardak.com.ru/ originating at IP Address 211.138.91.30 because the server did not return a valid response

Haha! Coming soon to dasBlog will be:

1. Trackbacks/Referrals can be deleted from posts
2. dasBlog will check an incoming trackback for a link to your site (preventing stupid spammers from getting links on your posts) and serve them a 404 if it does not find one.
3. dasBlog will check if the incoming url to see if it is even alive and server them a 404 if it is not.
4. dasBlog will check the trackback URL against the blocked referral blacklist (Scott checked this in but it's currently not working for me for some reason).
5. A number of other features and bugfixes as time allows (believe it or now, I'm dammed busy with work and life right now).

Must pass on link to fellow SF residents... You know you live in SF... [via Aditya]

I just found out via Josh Bancroft that the Creative Zen Micro can be turned on and off via the Remote! This is fantastic. After buying the remote, I quickly stopped using it because of this perceived limitation. I tend to keep the Micro in my bag, and I inadvertently mess up the current song I am listening to because it's hard to grab the device w/o touching one of the touch sensitive buttons.

I just pulled my remote out of hibernation and tested it out. Lo and behold... it works. Now that is something you can't do with the iPod remote (as far as I can recall).

I have to say. I am totally digging the new start.com/3 service. Not only do I dig it, but I really dig what those guys are doing. They are breaking a lot of Microsoft "rules" to get this stuff out there and in the hands of customers. This is reminiscent of the way things used to be long ago...

Personally I can't wait till they match some of the features I have in NewsGator Online such as read/unread status, flagging etc.

This is really cool, but an application that I wrote, Send to SmugMug made PC World's 30 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do on the Internet under Web APIs: Make the Big Sites Work for You.

"It's not just Amazon. Dreamworks animator Paul Rademacher has combined data from Google Maps and Craigslist to create an interactive map that lets you find housing in markets across the country. FlickrPaper employs Flickr's API to let users build desktop wallpaper from Flickr's shared photo collection. First Floor Software used a Yahoo API to create an image search engine that displays results as a slide show. The Send to Smug Mug plug-in enables users of Smugmug.com to send pics directly to the digital photography site by right-clicking an image inside Windows Explorer. And that's just a tiny sample of what's available."

This is so very cool. I can't believe they even found the application. It was quite fun to write (took me a weekend), and I got to play with some web services, albeit XML-RPC, but thanks to Cook Computing's XML-RPC.NET Library much of the grunt work is taken care of. The best part was, I solved a problem that I had using their service (I wanted to get gobs of Photos to their site fast), and did so in a really clean and elegant manner (if I can say so myself). It's nice to get mentioned in the article

Well I can't say I was shocked when I officially heard that Apple is moving to x86. I only wish they had done this earlier (it would have saved us folks working on Virtual PC 8 a bunch of work). I still remember when we were speculating back then that Apple would announce a switch to x86. However, we all realized that this would be extremely unlikely. Most ISV's were just finishing or recovering from a long process of getting their applications running on OS X. Apple would have killed their ISV's if they changed processor architecture's underneath them. Furthermore, Apple needed to convince its developer market that they had a solid set of development tools, and API set to make the eventual transition easier.

Now, 2 years later, they only need to lobby some of their biggest ISV's again (Microsoft, Adobe). Many of the smaller guys have moved to Cocoa and XCode which Apple has been heavily promoting the past few years (to Metrowerk's detriment). So, the timing seems better than ever to say so long to PowerPC. Not to mention Microsoft hasn't shipped a new OS in a while, and there is opportunity for Apple to be in the limelight.

But this kind of makes you wonder. Apple had to bear the brunt of two major processor architecture changes, and a major OS change in the past 20 years. Meanwhile the x86 world has remained largely compatible, and Windows as well. I can't imagine how much this has actually cost Apple in engineering man years, and ISV/Customer pain.

Anyway, this is a fairly interesting situation as Dan points out. I remember when Steve proclaimed that you could port an application to Mac OS X using Carbon in 2 weeks. He cited how Photoshop was ported to run on OS X using Carbon:

"An Adobe VP almost single handedly [sic] updated Photoshop to run smoothly on OS 10. Photoshop was running with almost no problems with only two weeks of work."

Meanwhile it took a little over a year after OS X was released for Adobe to actually release anything. It took a heck of a lot of work for us to get Office running and looking good on OS X. And today we saw:

"Toward that goal, Apple demonstrated software tools that allow developers to carry out this "recompile" by simply checking off "Intel" in an on-screen dialog box.

While it may not prove quite that easy in practice, Jobs leant [sic] credibility to the concept by having Wolfram Research software designer Theo Gray recount how his company was able to recompile its complex Mathematica program in less than two hours."

Two hours and a check box eh? Sadly all this is going to do is piss people off when <insert your favorite application with a significant code base over 10 years old> isn't available on day one that the new MacIntels are.

What's that saying... "Fool me once..." .

I'll be first in line to get a MacIntel PowerBook though. Apple is, and always will be an incredible maker of Hardware. Their software has and always will be a means to an end. That being a 1) great user experience, and 2) a vehicle to sell hardware. If they can manage to increase their market share by moving their highest margin product (hardware) to folks like me who look at a Dell and think Yuck, then the'll grow their business, possibly doubling sales in the next 4 years. Not sure where that's going to leave their OS business. Apple could be just as successfull shipping many of their applications to the PC and nailing the two goals above (assuming Longhorn really is going to be Simple, Safer and Sexier as Vic says).

I was really excited to see the news today that Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 will have support for Outlook. I always wondered why they would call something Visual Studio Tools for Office but only include support for Excel and Word. Well, Eric Carter and Eric Lippert have announced news that Steve Balmer made public today.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, then you know that I had some not so fun, but highly educational, months spent with none other than the .NET Framework and Outlook 2003. I found and complained to many folks inside Microsoft about what a sorry state managed programming for Outlook was, and thankfully this announcement puts to rest some of the most difficult aspects of managed programming in Outlook. Additionally, with the recent addition of the Office 2003 Primary Interop Assemblies Redistributable, even deployment gets easier.

To recap:

• You no longer need to use a shim
• You get your own AppDomain (translation, you won't hose other addins)
• You have a much simpler interface to implement
• Debugging seems much easier
• You get a strongly typed Application object
• You no longer have to call ReleaseComObject
• You no longer have to meticulously manage all your Outlook objects
• Outlook will now cleanly shutdown!
• I no longer need to fill my brain with COM stuff that I don't care to know about
• Some one else gets to work around Outlook bugs .

This all seems to good to be true .

You can read more here:

• Eric Carter
• Eric Lippert
• Architecture Overview Article

Many thanks to all those involved in listening to us complain endlessley about the problems and doing something about them!

Imagine the excitement when I saw a press release today announcing our RAW support for Digital Cameras. We've even announced Shell Integration for Windows XP. Now I'll be able to view my RAW Nikon photos on my Media Center. Sweet.

Today I just found out that Boeing is blogging about their new 777 series planes. Being a plane junkie, this is awesome. Subscribed.

Recently, Hotmail launched the MSN Postmaster site. While this may not be of direct interest to our end users, it's a big deal for any ISP interested in helping curtail abuse on their networks, or for anyone interested in the efforts we take in providing a junk free environment.

A couple of weeks ago I got a demo of the Smart Network Data Services and was just floored at how cool it is. One of the things that I love about our service is that due to its size, you can do some really interesting work. This is just one example of how we, as one of the largest internet services on the planet, can aggregate and provide information that is of benefit to the larger ecosystem. If you own an IP that sends any mail, you can sign up for this service and see what is happening to that mail once it hits our network.

We also document all our Junk Mail fighting techniques. They include:

• SmartScreen
• Symantec Brightmail
• Custom Hotmail Junk Mail Filters
• User Controlled Filters
• Sender ID
• Bonded Sender

Anyway, there is a plethora of information on the MSN Postmaster site, so check it out.

Kevin Schofield (who is the General Manager of Microsoft Research) wrote a post detailing the potential horrors that await us with regards to Bird Flu.

I'm fortunate to have grown up in a world where I didn't have to worry about a host of diseases (no vaccination scars on my arm, like most of my cousins who are all 5-10 years older than me). Cancer, Aids, and our own fault are responsible for much of the misery our immune systems face. But having studied biology in college, I am familiar with the sorry state of vaccine R&D... I hope our best minds are hard at work to prevent us from all getting bird flu.

I almost forgot that I never finished my Treo Review Series. The device is so integrated into my habits now that I don't even notice how much I depend on and value the device. It's been over a month since the last review, and that's a good thing because I have finally settled on all the applications that I deem "core" to my Treo experience, and the stability of the device has gone up as a result since I don't install/uninstall programs daily.

If you missed it, here is Part 1, & Part 2

Applications

I thought I would tell you about all the Applications I use. Personally I do not feel that the value add of the Treo is solely based on what comes in the box. Much of it has to do with the fact that there are thousands of wonderful applications. Here is my short list of must have products and what they do.

Vindigo (24.95 a year)

Vindigo is an indispensable tool and one I have used off and on since they launched. They do not have an application for the Microsoft Smartphone, only Pocket PC and Palm. Vindigo lets you get location based information for food, bars, movies, weather, maps, museums etc. It's valuable for the city I live in and many cities that I travel to.

Bart Planner (free)

If you live in San Francisco, having access to Bart schedules is a must, and this application does not dissapoint.

Caltrain+ (free)

Ditto about this, but for Caltrain instead of Bart.

Directory Assistant (donation ware)

This is an excellent Yellow Pages search application that has nice integration with the Palm OS (to create new address book entries, copy info to the clipboard etc)

FileZ (free)

This is a freeware application for managing files, memory cards, and preferences for Palm applications. It's nice if you like to hack.

KeyCaps 650 (free)

This is an indispensable application that allows you to capitalize, and enter optional characters by simply holding down keys on the keyboard, or double pressing a key quickly. Wonderful for one handed use.

Slap ($10)

If you use Getting Things Done, this is a must have. Slap is like a limitless Note, that you can use to jot anything down quickly, and then later make that into a Contact, Appointment, Memo, or Task. It's like a Sticky Note. I use this all the time to quickly capture information to be processed later much like an Inbox.

Snap (free)

Simple application for taking screen shots on the Treo.

SplashID (29.95 or part of SplashWallet)

From SplashData, a great program for managing all your passwords, credit cards, ID cards etc. Comes with a companion desktop application and can be purchased in a bundle (SplashWallet).

SplashMoney (29.95 or part of SplashWallet)

Also from SplashData, a program for managing your finances. SplashMoney can connect to your bank and download transactions much like Microsoft Money and Quicken (bank must support statement download via OFX). This is excellent for knowing how much money I have when I am mobile. Comes with a companion desktop application and can be purchased in a bundle (SplashWallet).

SplashPhoto (29.95 or part of SplashWallet)

Also from SplashData, this is a Album and Capture application that is far better than the built in Treo applications. Comes with a companion desktop application and can be purchased in a bundle (SplashWallet).

SplashShopper (29.95 or part of SplashWallet)

Also from SplashData, this is a shopping list and general list program. Jot down all the groceries, gifts, books, wine, gear and other stuff you wish to purchase. It also allows you to keep such lists as travel checklists and can be customized to your liking. Comes with a companion desktop application and can be purchased in a bundle (SplashWallet).

Tetris (19.99)

Enough said. My wife is still addicted to Tetris.

TreoAlarm (free)

An Alarm clock with built in weather updates. Wakes me up every morning!

VeriChat (24.95 a year)

An indispensable multi-stack IM client that supports AOL, Yahoo, MSN. I LOVE this product. It works wonderfully, keeps me connected even with a spotty GPRS connection, and makes my Treo a fantastic IM tool.

FieldPlus (free)

It's shocking the Treo does not support shift-select, but FieldPlus will allow you to press the Shift Key and use the 5 way navigation pad to select text keeping the stylus or your fingers away from the screen. It also adds many other useful features like a Command Bar when you hold the menu button. This also improves one handed use.

Profiles (free)

It's also shocking that the Treo does not have profiles support like most mobile phones. The Pocket PC does not either, but one feature I loved in my Microsoft Smartphone was that it would automatically vibrate in meetings. Well, Profiles will allow you to define any number of profiles that can be invoked from a number of different triggers. One of those triggers can be the start/end of an appointment. No more embarrassing ringing in meetings!

Pocket Mirror XT Standard (29.95)

How do I say this... the Palm Conduits don't sync, they mostly duplicate. On the first hint of trouble, they duplicate data. No field level sync, nothing. I don't even think there is really any kind of algorithm for determining which record is the most recent as it seems random to me. I have absolutely zero confidence in the Palm sync software, and have gotten rid of it in favor of Pocket Mirror. It just works and I don't have to think about it.

Thankfully since VersaMail does Mail and Calendar I only have to worry about Contacts, Tasks and Notes. I just have Pocket Mirror do this. Since I managed the Entourage Sync Conduit for the Palm project (design, help dev, and test a lot of it) I have intimate knowledge of just how sorry building a sync conduit for HotSync can be. However, we optimized the heck out of our conduit to NOT DUPLICATE UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. You can always do a field level compare between records to eliminate 99% of duplications.

You must take care and ensure that you do not install the Calendar Sync conduit if you are using VersaMail to sync to Exchange.

Battery Life

Battery Life isn't amazing, but it's good. If you just use this as a Phone and PIM you'll get great battery life. However, if you are syncing mail ever 15 min, using Bluetooth and browsing the web a lot you'll get about as much battery life as a comparable Windows Pocket PC or Smartphone, which for me was 2-3 days max. I charge my device every night though.

Camera

The Camera is decent. Better than my Audiovox 5600, but still problematic. I wish it were a megapixel camera, but it's fairly decent for what I use it for.

Final Thoughts

I have gotten quite a bit of interest from folks inside Microsoft about my Treo experiences. A few folks I know have even purchased devices. In all cases I do not hesitate in recommending a Treo 650 to anyone who works at Microsoft, or anyone who cannot use a Blackberry but does have Exchange 2003. palmOne's support of Exchange, and our blessing, was the real tipping point for me even considering something I had previously ignored but secretly admired. My frustration and impatience of waiting for a Windows device with a similar form factor are no longer eating away at my geek persona. When and if one exists (for sale to Omar from my carrier) I'll happily consider that device.

The Treo does have its quirks, bugs and annoyances. You are really just trading one set of problems for another if you are considering switching from a Windows Mobile device. However, the form factor, and reliability are enough of a benefit for me to deal with the issues.

It's really hard to explain, but the Treo is a digital "companion". When I am traveling, or out and about, I have a world of handy tools at my fingertips. The ease of data entry has increased my usage of mobile IM, SMS, mapping and directory tools, mobile email, even access to all of Wikipedia via Wapedia. It's even improved my continued use of Getting Things Done as I can easily access my tasks by context, take notes in Slap, and file lots of tidbits into my Memos which prior to my Treo was akin to an empty parking lot in Outlook. Now it's buzzing with Reference material, Notes, Agendas, Lists etc.

If there were 4 things I could ask Palm to improve they would be:

1. Exchange Sync that's as good or better than Windows Mobile Devices. Fix your bugs (there are many sync related annoyances).
2. Fix the anemic PIM applications. They should round-trip all the same data found in Outlook. This includes fixing your busted Conduits.
3. Improve the flow between applications. Right now it feels like using a Macintosh before there was a multi-finder. Changing context between programs should not feel like you are quitting/relaunching all the time. This is especially important when moving between Email, Web, and PIM products.
4. Fix your bugs. 99% of the crashes that occur on my Treo are related to "Web", "VersaMail", "Applications", "Messaging". These are all Palm apps.